log entries

1990-00-00

3627

Prince of Persia was an excellent game. I would play it for hours on end, and annoy my dad with the monotone sound of the Prince's footsteps. I think I got pretty far, but could never finish it due to the exceptionally annoying choice of having a 60 minute timer.

2014-09-29

4614

Played through levels 1-8 with Erik, before we ran out of time. That's the level I reached 24 years ago, the one that starts with the princess and the mouse.

2017-07-24

7999

completed the game (FS-UAE).
Erik and got back into Prince of Persia, and we spent almost all day on it. We started over several times after running out of time, but gradually built knowledge of the 12 levels and improved our acrobatic and fencing skills. After having played through most of the levels many times, I was completely out of steam and had to take a break, while Erik sprinted through the early parts. He handed me the controller, and after a few failed attempts, I beat the last level, sheathing my sword to join with my shadow self, beating Jaffar, and nervously running through the last area and reaching the princess!

8000

Playing this classic game all day, I have been wondering about its poor performance. It seems the game slows down when there are too many animated objects on the screen, and it doesn't seem to help to run it on faster hardware. That led me to wonder if maybe a fixed number of animated objects are updated every frame, in a round-robin fashion, and slowing the whole game down, when there are more than a few. Erik and I switched to NTSC to run the game a bit faster, which did help a lot, but it's still disappointing, when you know what the Amiga is capable of.

8001

Another thing that stood out to me was the sound effects. They are all pretty fantastic, perfectly mixed for the environment with baked-in reverb, and communicate the game state very well. However, a weird limitation is that the game seems to only be able to play one sound effect at a time. I'm thinking this could be a lowest common denominator for all the platforms the game was released for, but it's a shame, when the Amiga has 4 perfectly good sample channels that could be used without any overhead.